Ziyu Wang

LG
h-index67
130papers
12,468citations
Novelty52%
AI Score61

130 Papers

CVMar 7, 2022Code
Kubric: A scalable dataset generator

Klaus Greff, Francois Belletti, Lucas Beyer et al. · deepmind, mila

Data is the driving force of machine learning, with the amount and quality of training data often being more important for the performance of a system than architecture and training details. But collecting, processing and annotating real data at scale is difficult, expensive, and frequently raises additional privacy, fairness and legal concerns. Synthetic data is a powerful tool with the potential to address these shortcomings: 1) it is cheap 2) supports rich ground-truth annotations 3) offers full control over data and 4) can circumvent or mitigate problems regarding bias, privacy and licensing. Unfortunately, software tools for effective data generation are less mature than those for architecture design and training, which leads to fragmented generation efforts. To address these problems we introduce Kubric, an open-source Python framework that interfaces with PyBullet and Blender to generate photo-realistic scenes, with rich annotations, and seamlessly scales to large jobs distributed over thousands of machines, and generating TBs of data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Kubric by presenting a series of 13 different generated datasets for tasks ranging from studying 3D NeRF models to optical flow estimation. We release Kubric, the used assets, all of the generation code, as well as the rendered datasets for reuse and modification.

CVMay 29
PRISM: Progressive Reasoning through Iterative Slot Memory for Vision

Ziyu Wang, Shuangpeng Han, Mengmi Zhang

Modern vision models process images in a single feed-forward pass, which limits their ability to recover missing evidence or refine uncertain representations under incomplete observations. Inspired by the iterative nature of human perception, we introduce PRISM (Progressive Reasoning through Iterative Slot Memory), a pyramid vision architecture that reasons over images through iterative refinement. At a high level, PRISM groups visual features into object-centric representations, retrieves relevant patterns from a learned memory, and iteratively refines the representation to resolve ambiguity and recover missing information. This organize-recall-refine process operates recurrently across multiple scales, enabling progressive improvement of visual representations. Across standard vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, PRISM achieves competitive performance while demonstrating improved robustness under incomplete observations such as occlusion. These results suggest that iterative reasoning with structured representations and memory is a promising direction for building more resilient and adaptive vision models. Source code and models will be released.

CVAug 22, 2022Code
SWEM: Towards Real-Time Video Object Segmentation with Sequential Weighted Expectation-Maximization

Zhihui Lin, Tianyu Yang, Maomao Li et al.

Matching-based methods, especially those based on space-time memory, are significantly ahead of other solutions in semi-supervised video object segmentation (VOS). However, continuously growing and redundant template features lead to an inefficient inference. To alleviate this, we propose a novel Sequential Weighted Expectation-Maximization (SWEM) network to greatly reduce the redundancy of memory features. Different from the previous methods which only detect feature redundancy between frames, SWEM merges both intra-frame and inter-frame similar features by leveraging the sequential weighted EM algorithm. Further, adaptive weights for frame features endow SWEM with the flexibility to represent hard samples, improving the discrimination of templates. Besides, the proposed method maintains a fixed number of template features in memory, which ensures the stable inference complexity of the VOS system. Extensive experiments on commonly used DAVIS and YouTube-VOS datasets verify the high efficiency (36 FPS) and high performance (84.3\% $\mathcal{J}\&\mathcal{F}$ on DAVIS 2017 validation dataset) of SWEM. Code is available at: https://github.com/lmm077/SWEM.

CVApr 15
Seedance 2.0: Advancing Video Generation for World Complexity

Team Seedance, De Chen, Liyang Chen et al. · gatech

Seedance 2.0 is a new native multi-modal audio-video generation model, officially released in China in early February 2026. Compared with its predecessors, Seedance 1.0 and 1.5 Pro, Seedance 2.0 adopts a unified, highly efficient, and large-scale architecture for multi-modal audio-video joint generation. This allows it to support four input modalities: text, image, audio, and video, by integrating one of the most comprehensive suites of multi-modal content reference and editing capabilities available in the industry to date. It delivers substantial, well-rounded improvements across all key sub-dimensions of video and audio generation. In both expert evaluations and public user tests, the model has demonstrated performance on par with the leading levels in the field. Seedance 2.0 supports direct generation of audio-video content with durations ranging from 4 to 15 seconds, with native output resolutions of 480p and 720p. For multi-modal inputs as reference, its current open platform supports up to 3 video clips, 9 images, and 3 audio clips. In addition, we provide Seedance 2.0 Fast version, an accelerated variant of Seedance 2.0 designed to boost generation speed for low-latency scenarios. Seedance 2.0 has delivered significant improvements to its foundational generation capabilities and multi-modal generation performance, bringing an enhanced creative experience for end users.

CVFeb 16, 2023Code
Object-centric Learning with Cyclic Walks between Parts and Whole

Ziyu Wang, Mike Zheng Shou, Mengmi Zhang

Learning object-centric representations from complex natural environments enables both humans and machines with reasoning abilities from low-level perceptual features. To capture compositional entities of the scene, we proposed cyclic walks between perceptual features extracted from vision transformers and object entities. First, a slot-attention module interfaces with these perceptual features and produces a finite set of slot representations. These slots can bind to any object entities in the scene via inter-slot competitions for attention. Next, we establish entity-feature correspondence with cyclic walks along high transition probability based on the pairwise similarity between perceptual features (aka "parts") and slot-binded object representations (aka "whole"). The whole is greater than its parts and the parts constitute the whole. The part-whole interactions form cycle consistencies, as supervisory signals, to train the slot-attention module. Our rigorous experiments on \textit{seven} image datasets in \textit{three} \textit{unsupervised} tasks demonstrate that the networks trained with our cyclic walks can disentangle foregrounds and backgrounds, discover objects, and segment semantic objects in complex scenes. In contrast to object-centric models attached with a decoder for the pixel-level or feature-level reconstructions, our cyclic walks provide strong learning signals, avoiding computation overheads and enhancing memory efficiency. Our source code and data are available at: \href{https://github.com/ZhangLab-DeepNeuroCogLab/Parts-Whole-Object-Centric-Learning/}{link}.

CVApr 10, 2023
Neural Residual Radiance Fields for Streamably Free-Viewpoint Videos

Liao Wang, Qiang Hu, Qihan He et al.

The success of the Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) for modeling and free-view rendering static objects has inspired numerous attempts on dynamic scenes. Current techniques that utilize neural rendering for facilitating free-view videos (FVVs) are restricted to either offline rendering or are capable of processing only brief sequences with minimal motion. In this paper, we present a novel technique, Residual Radiance Field or ReRF, as a highly compact neural representation to achieve real-time FVV rendering on long-duration dynamic scenes. ReRF explicitly models the residual information between adjacent timestamps in the spatial-temporal feature space, with a global coordinate-based tiny MLP as the feature decoder. Specifically, ReRF employs a compact motion grid along with a residual feature grid to exploit inter-frame feature similarities. We show such a strategy can handle large motions without sacrificing quality. We further present a sequential training scheme to maintain the smoothness and the sparsity of the motion/residual grids. Based on ReRF, we design a special FVV codec that achieves three orders of magnitudes compression rate and provides a companion ReRF player to support online streaming of long-duration FVVs of dynamic scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ReRF for compactly representing dynamic radiance fields, enabling an unprecedented free-viewpoint viewing experience in speed and quality.

MLOct 29, 2022
Spectral Representation Learning for Conditional Moment Models

Ziyu Wang, Yucen Luo, Yueru Li et al.

Many problems in causal inference and economics can be formulated in the framework of conditional moment models, which characterize the target function through a collection of conditional moment restrictions. For nonparametric conditional moment models, efficient estimation often relies on preimposed conditions on various measures of ill-posedness of the hypothesis space, which are hard to validate when flexible models are used. In this work, we address this issue by proposing a procedure that automatically learns representations with controlled measures of ill-posedness. Our method approximates a linear representation defined by the spectral decomposition of a conditional expectation operator, which can be used for kernelized estimators and is known to facilitate minimax optimal estimation in certain settings. We show this representation can be efficiently estimated from data, and establish L2 consistency for the resulting estimator. We evaluate the proposed method on proximal causal inference tasks, exhibiting promising performance on high-dimensional, semi-synthetic data.

SDAug 26, 2024
Foundation Models for Music: A Survey

Yinghao Ma, Anders Øland, Anton Ragni et al.

In recent years, foundation models (FMs) such as large language models (LLMs) and latent diffusion models (LDMs) have profoundly impacted diverse sectors, including music. This comprehensive review examines state-of-the-art (SOTA) pre-trained models and foundation models in music, spanning from representation learning, generative learning and multimodal learning. We first contextualise the significance of music in various industries and trace the evolution of AI in music. By delineating the modalities targeted by foundation models, we discover many of the music representations are underexplored in FM development. Then, emphasis is placed on the lack of versatility of previous methods on diverse music applications, along with the potential of FMs in music understanding, generation and medical application. By comprehensively exploring the details of the model pre-training paradigm, architectural choices, tokenisation, finetuning methodologies and controllability, we emphasise the important topics that should have been well explored, like instruction tuning and in-context learning, scaling law and emergent ability, as well as long-sequence modelling etc. A dedicated section presents insights into music agents, accompanied by a thorough analysis of datasets and evaluations essential for pre-training and downstream tasks. Finally, by underscoring the vital importance of ethical considerations, we advocate that following research on FM for music should focus more on such issues as interpretability, transparency, human responsibility, and copyright issues. The paper offers insights into future challenges and trends on FMs for music, aiming to shape the trajectory of human-AI collaboration in the music realm.

CVSep 9, 2022
Generative Deformable Radiance Fields for Disentangled Image Synthesis of Topology-Varying Objects

Ziyu Wang, Yu Deng, Jiaolong Yang et al.

3D-aware generative models have demonstrated their superb performance to generate 3D neural radiance fields (NeRF) from a collection of monocular 2D images even for topology-varying object categories. However, these methods still lack the capability to separately control the shape and appearance of the objects in the generated radiance fields. In this paper, we propose a generative model for synthesizing radiance fields of topology-varying objects with disentangled shape and appearance variations. Our method generates deformable radiance fields, which builds the dense correspondence between the density fields of the objects and encodes their appearances in a shared template field. Our disentanglement is achieved in an unsupervised manner without introducing extra labels to previous 3D-aware GAN training. We also develop an effective image inversion scheme for reconstructing the radiance field of an object in a real monocular image and manipulating its shape and appearance. Experiments show that our method can successfully learn the generative model from unstructured monocular images and well disentangle the shape and appearance for objects (e.g., chairs) with large topological variance. The model trained on synthetic data can faithfully reconstruct the real object in a given single image and achieve high-quality texture and shape editing results.

CRApr 13, 2023
PowerGAN: A Machine Learning Approach for Power Side-Channel Attack on Compute-in-Memory Accelerators

Ziyu Wang, Yuting Wu, Yongmo Park et al.

Analog compute-in-memory (CIM) systems are promising for deep neural network (DNN) inference acceleration due to their energy efficiency and high throughput. However, as the use of DNNs expands, protecting user input privacy has become increasingly important. In this paper, we identify a potential security vulnerability wherein an adversary can reconstruct the user's private input data from a power side-channel attack, under proper data acquisition and pre-processing, even without knowledge of the DNN model. We further demonstrate a machine learning-based attack approach using a generative adversarial network (GAN) to enhance the data reconstruction. Our results show that the attack methodology is effective in reconstructing user inputs from analog CIM accelerator power leakage, even at large noise levels and after countermeasures are applied. Specifically, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on an example of U-Net inference chip for brain tumor detection, and show the original magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) medical images can be successfully reconstructed even at a noise-level of 20% standard deviation of the maximum power signal value. Our study highlights a potential security vulnerability in analog CIM accelerators and raises awareness of using GAN to breach user privacy in such systems.

CVDec 10, 2022
HumanGen: Generating Human Radiance Fields with Explicit Priors

Suyi Jiang, Haoran Jiang, Ziyu Wang et al.

Recent years have witnessed the tremendous progress of 3D GANs for generating view-consistent radiance fields with photo-realism. Yet, high-quality generation of human radiance fields remains challenging, partially due to the limited human-related priors adopted in existing methods. We present HumanGen, a novel 3D human generation scheme with detailed geometry and $\text{360}^{\circ}$ realistic free-view rendering. It explicitly marries the 3D human generation with various priors from the 2D generator and 3D reconstructor of humans through the design of "anchor image". We introduce a hybrid feature representation using the anchor image to bridge the latent space of HumanGen with the existing 2D generator. We then adopt a pronged design to disentangle the generation of geometry and appearance. With the aid of the anchor image, we adapt a 3D reconstructor for fine-grained details synthesis and propose a two-stage blending scheme to boost appearance generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our effectiveness for state-of-the-art 3D human generation regarding geometry details, texture quality, and free-view performance. Notably, HumanGen can also incorporate various off-the-shelf 2D latent editing methods, seamlessly lifting them into 3D.

LGMar 9, 2023
NoiseCAM: Explainable AI for the Boundary Between Noise and Adversarial Attacks

Wenkai Tan, Justus Renkhoff, Alvaro Velasquez et al.

Deep Learning (DL) and Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are widely used in various domains. However, adversarial attacks can easily mislead a neural network and lead to wrong decisions. Defense mechanisms are highly preferred in safety-critical applications. In this paper, firstly, we use the gradient class activation map (GradCAM) to analyze the behavior deviation of the VGG-16 network when its inputs are mixed with adversarial perturbation or Gaussian noise. In particular, our method can locate vulnerable layers that are sensitive to adversarial perturbation and Gaussian noise. We also show that the behavior deviation of vulnerable layers can be used to detect adversarial examples. Secondly, we propose a novel NoiseCAM algorithm that integrates information from globally and pixel-level weighted class activation maps. Our algorithm is susceptible to adversarial perturbations and will not respond to Gaussian random noise mixed in the inputs. Third, we compare detecting adversarial examples using both behavior deviation and NoiseCAM, and we show that NoiseCAM outperforms behavior deviation modeling in its overall performance. Our work could provide a useful tool to defend against certain adversarial attacks on deep neural networks.

SPAug 2, 2024
ECG Unveiled: Analysis of Client Re-identification Risks in Real-World ECG Datasets

Ziyu Wang, Anil Kanduri, Seyed Amir Hossein Aqajari et al.

While ECG data is crucial for diagnosing and monitoring heart conditions, it also contains unique biometric information that poses significant privacy risks. Existing ECG re-identification studies rely on exhaustive analysis of numerous deep learning features, confining to ad-hoc explainability towards clinicians decision making. In this work, we delve into explainability of ECG re-identification risks using transparent machine learning models. We use SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) analysis to identify and explain the key features contributing to re-identification risks. We conduct an empirical analysis of identity re-identification risks using ECG data from five diverse real-world datasets, encompassing 223 participants. By employing transparent machine learning models, we reveal the diversity among different ECG features in contributing towards re-identification of individuals with an accuracy of 0.76 for gender, 0.67 for age group, and 0.82 for participant ID re-identification. Our approach provides valuable insights for clinical experts and guides the development of effective privacy-preserving mechanisms. Further, our findings emphasize the necessity for robust privacy measures in real-world health applications and offer detailed, actionable insights for enhancing data anonymization techniques.

LGNov 3, 2023Code
RigLSTM: Recurrent Independent Grid LSTM for Generalizable Sequence Learning

Ziyu Wang, Wenhao Jiang, Zixuan Zhang et al.

Sequential processes in real-world often carry a combination of simple subsystems that interact with each other in certain forms. Learning such a modular structure can often improve the robustness against environmental changes. In this paper, we propose recurrent independent Grid LSTM (RigLSTM), composed of a group of independent LSTM cells that cooperate with each other, for exploiting the underlying modular structure of the target task. Our model adopts cell selection, input feature selection, hidden state selection, and soft state updating to achieve a better generalization ability on the basis of the recent Grid LSTM for the tasks where some factors differ between training and evaluation. Specifically, at each time step, only a fraction of cells are activated, and the activated cells select relevant inputs and cells to communicate with. At the end of one time step, the hidden states of the activated cells are updated by considering the relevance between the inputs and the hidden states from the last and current time steps. Extensive experiments on diversified sequential modeling tasks are conducted to show the superior generalization ability when there exist changes in the testing environment. Source code is available at \url{https://github.com/ziyuwwang/rig-lstm}.

CVMar 8, 2022
NeReF: Neural Refractive Field for Fluid Surface Reconstruction and Implicit Representation

Ziyu Wang, Wei Yang, Junming Cao et al.

Existing neural reconstruction schemes such as Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) are largely focused on modeling opaque objects. We present a novel neural refractive field(NeReF) to recover wavefront of transparent fluids by simultaneously estimating the surface position and normal of the fluid front. Unlike prior arts that treat the reconstruction target as a single layer of the surface, NeReF is specifically formulated to recover a volumetric normal field with its corresponding density field. A query ray will be refracted by NeReF according to its accumulated refractive point and normal, and we employ the correspondences and uniqueness of refracted ray for NeReF optimization. We show NeReF, as a global optimization scheme, can more robustly tackle refraction distortions detrimental to traditional methods for correspondence matching. Furthermore, the continuous NeReF representation of wavefront enables view synthesis as well as normal integration. We validate our approach on both synthetic and real data and show it is particularly suitable for sparse multi-view acquisition. We hence build a small light field array and experiment on various surface shapes to demonstrate high fidelity NeReF reconstruction.

SDOct 25, 2023
Structured Multi-Track Accompaniment Arrangement via Style Prior Modelling

Jingwei Zhao, Gus Xia, Ziyu Wang et al.

In the realm of music AI, arranging rich and structured multi-track accompaniments from a simple lead sheet presents significant challenges. Such challenges include maintaining track cohesion, ensuring long-term coherence, and optimizing computational efficiency. In this paper, we introduce a novel system that leverages prior modelling over disentangled style factors to address these challenges. Our method presents a two-stage process: initially, a piano arrangement is derived from the lead sheet by retrieving piano texture styles; subsequently, a multi-track orchestration is generated by infusing orchestral function styles into the piano arrangement. Our key design is the use of vector quantization and a unique multi-stream Transformer to model the long-term flow of the orchestration style, which enables flexible, controllable, and structured music generation. Experiments show that by factorizing the arrangement task into interpretable sub-stages, our approach enhances generative capacity while improving efficiency. Additionally, our system supports a variety of music genres and provides style control at different composition hierarchies. We further show that our system achieves superior coherence, structure, and overall arrangement quality compared to existing baselines.

LGApr 12
CARE-ECG: Causal Agent-based Reasoning for Explainable and Counterfactual ECG Interpretation

Elahe Khatibi, Ziyu Wang, Ankita Sharma et al.

Large language models (LLMs) enable waveform-to-text ECG interpretation and interactive clinical questioning, yet most ECG-LLM systems still rely on weak signal-text alignment and retrieval without explicit physiological or causal structure. This limits grounding, temporal reasoning, and counterfactual "what-if" analysis central to clinical decision-making. We propose CARE-ECG, a causally structured ECG-language reasoning framework that unifies representation learning, diagnosis, and explanation in a single pipeline. CARE-ECG encodes multi-lead ECGs into temporally organized latent biomarkers, performs causal graph inference for probabilistic diagnosis, and supports counterfactual assessment via structural causal models. To improve faithfulness, CARE-ECG grounds language outputs through causal retrieval-augmented generation and a modular agentic pipeline that integrates history, diagnosis, and response with verification. Across multiple ECG benchmarks and expert QA settings, CARE-ECG improves diagnostic accuracy and explanation faithfulness while reducing hallucinations (e.g., 0.84 accuracy on Expert-ECG-QA and 0.76 on SCP-mapped PTB-XL under GPT-4). Overall, CARE-ECG provides traceable reasoning by exposing key latent drivers, causal evidence paths, and how alternative physiological states would change outcomes.

CVMar 19, 2023
RN-Net: Reservoir Nodes-Enabled Neuromorphic Vision Sensing Network

Sangmin Yoo, Eric Yeu-Jer Lee, Ziyu Wang et al.

Event-based cameras are inspired by the sparse and asynchronous spike representation of the biological visual system. However, processing the event data requires either using expensive feature descriptors to transform spikes into frames, or using spiking neural networks that are expensive to train. In this work, we propose a neural network architecture, Reservoir Nodes-enabled neuromorphic vision sensing Network (RN-Net), based on simple convolution layers integrated with dynamic temporal encoding reservoirs for local and global spatiotemporal feature detection with low hardware and training costs. The RN-Net allows efficient processing of asynchronous temporal features, and achieves the highest accuracy of 99.2% for DVS128 Gesture reported to date, and one of the highest accuracy of 67.5% for DVS Lip dataset at a much smaller network size. By leveraging the internal device and circuit dynamics, asynchronous temporal feature encoding can be implemented at very low hardware cost without preprocessing and dedicated memory and arithmetic units. The use of simple DNN blocks and standard backpropagation-based training rules further reduces implementation costs.

LGApr 12
Membership Inference Attacks Expose Participation Privacy in ECG Foundation Encoders

Ziyu Wang, Elahe Khatibi, Ankita Sharma et al.

Foundation-style ECG encoders pretrained with self-supervised learning are increasingly reused across tasks, institutions, and deployment contexts, often through model-as-a-service interfaces that expose scalar scores or latent representations. While such reuse improves data efficiency and generalization, it raises a participation privacy concern: can an adversary infer whether a specific individual or cohort contributed ECG data to pretraining, even when raw waveforms and diagnostic labels are never disclosed? In connected-health settings, training participation itself may reveal institutional affiliation, study enrollment, or sensitive health context. We present an implementation-grounded audit of membership inference attacks (MIAs) against modern self-supervised ECG foundation encoders, covering contrastive objectives (SimCLR, TS2Vec) and masked reconstruction objectives (CNN- and Transformer-based MAE). We evaluate three realistic attacker interfaces: (i) score-only black-box access to scalar outputs, (ii) adaptive learned attackers that aggregate subject-level statistics across repeated queries, and (iii) embedding-access attackers that probe latent representation geometry. Using a subject-centric protocol with window-to-subject aggregation and calibration at fixed false-positive rates under a cross-dataset auditing setting, we observe heterogeneous and objective-dependent participation leakage: leakage is most pronounced in small or institution-specific cohorts and, for contrastive encoders, can saturate in embedding space, while larger and more diverse datasets substantially attenuate operational tail risk. Overall, our results show that restricting access to raw signals or labels is insufficient to guarantee participation privacy, underscoring the need for deployment-aware auditing of reusable biosignal foundation encoders in connected-health systems.

SDAug 27, 2024
Unifying Symbolic Music Arrangement: Track-Aware Reconstruction and Structured Tokenization

Longshen Ou, Jingwei Zhao, Ziyu Wang et al.

We present a unified framework for automatic multitrack music arrangement that enables a single pre-trained symbolic music model to handle diverse arrangement scenarios, including reinterpretation, simplification, and additive generation. At its core is a segment-level reconstruction objective operating on token-level disentangled content and style, allowing for flexible any-to-any instrumentation transformations at inference time. To support track-wise modeling, we introduce REMI-z, a structured tokenization scheme for multitrack symbolic music that enhances modeling efficiency and effectiveness for both arrangement tasks and unconditional generation. Our method outperforms task-specific state-of-the-art models on representative tasks in different arrangement scenarios -- band arrangement, piano reduction, and drum arrangement, in both objective metrics and perceptual evaluations. Taken together, our framework demonstrates strong generality and suggests broader applicability in symbolic music-to-music transformation.

SDSep 21, 2022
Modeling Perceptual Loudness of Piano Tone: Theory and Applications

Yang Qu, Yutian Qin, Lecheng Chao et al.

The relationship between perceptual loudness and physical attributes of sound is an important subject in both computer music and psychoacoustics. Early studies of "equal-loudness contour" can trace back to the 1920s and the measured loudness with respect to intensity and frequency has been revised many times since then. However, most studies merely focus on synthesized sound, and the induced theories on natural tones with complex timbre have rarely been justified. To this end, we investigate both theory and applications of natural-tone loudness perception in this paper via modeling piano tone. The theory part contains: 1) an accurate measurement of piano-tone equal-loudness contour of pitches, and 2) a machine-learning model capable of inferring loudness purely based on spectral features trained on human subject measurements. As for the application, we apply our theory to piano control transfer, in which we adjust the MIDI velocities on two different player pianos (in different acoustic environments) to achieve the same perceptual effect. Experiments show that both our theoretical loudness modeling and the corresponding performance control transfer algorithm significantly outperform their baselines.

LGJul 11, 2024
Enhancing Performance and User Engagement in Everyday Stress Monitoring: A Context-Aware Active Reinforcement Learning Approach

Seyed Amir Hossein Aqajari, Ziyu Wang, Ali Tazarv et al.

In today's fast-paced world, accurately monitoring stress levels is crucial. Sensor-based stress monitoring systems often need large datasets for training effective models. However, individual-specific models are necessary for personalized and interactive scenarios. Traditional methods like Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMAs) assess stress but struggle with efficient data collection without burdening users. The challenge is to timely send EMAs, especially during stress, balancing monitoring efficiency and user convenience. This paper introduces a novel context-aware active reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for enhanced stress detection using Photoplethysmography (PPG) data from smartwatches and contextual data from smartphones. Our approach dynamically selects optimal times for deploying EMAs, utilizing the user's immediate context to maximize label accuracy and minimize intrusiveness. Initially, the study was executed in an offline environment to refine the label collection process, aiming to increase accuracy while reducing user burden. Later, we integrated a real-time label collection mechanism, transitioning to an online methodology. This shift resulted in an 11% improvement in stress detection efficiency. Incorporating contextual data improved model accuracy by 4%. Personalization studies indicated a 10% enhancement in AUC-ROC scores, demonstrating better stress level differentiation. This research marks a significant move towards personalized, context-driven real-time stress monitoring methods.

SDFeb 25, 2024Code
ChatMusician: Understanding and Generating Music Intrinsically with LLM

Ruibin Yuan, Hanfeng Lin, Yi Wang et al.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in text generation, we find that their ability has yet to be generalized to music, humanity's creative language. We introduce ChatMusician, an open-source LLM that integrates intrinsic musical abilities. It is based on continual pre-training and finetuning LLaMA2 on a text-compatible music representation, ABC notation, and the music is treated as a second language. ChatMusician can understand and generate music with a pure text tokenizer without any external multi-modal neural structures or tokenizers. Interestingly, endowing musical abilities does not harm language abilities, even achieving a slightly higher MMLU score. Our model is capable of composing well-structured, full-length music, conditioned on texts, chords, melodies, motifs, musical forms, etc, surpassing GPT-4 baseline. On our meticulously curated college-level music understanding benchmark, MusicTheoryBench, ChatMusician surpasses LLaMA2 and GPT-3.5 on zero-shot setting by a noticeable margin. Our work reveals that LLMs can be an excellent compressor for music, but there remains significant territory to be conquered. We release our 4B token music-language corpora MusicPile, the collected MusicTheoryBench, code, model and demo in GitHub.

LGJul 4, 2024
Unsupervised Disentanglement of Content and Style via Variance-Invariance Constraints

Yuxuan Wu, Ziyu Wang, Bhiksha Raj et al.

We contribute an unsupervised method that effectively learns disentangled content and style representations from sequences of observations. Unlike most disentanglement algorithms that rely on domain-specific labels or knowledge, our method is based on the insight of domain-general statistical differences between content and style -- content varies more among different fragments within a sample but maintains an invariant vocabulary across data samples, whereas style remains relatively invariant within a sample but exhibits more significant variation across different samples. We integrate such inductive bias into an encoder-decoder architecture and name our method after V3 (variance-versus-invariance). Experimental results show that V3 generalizes across multiple domains and modalities, successfully learning disentangled content and style representations, such as pitch and timbre from music audio, digit and color from images of hand-written digits, and action and character appearance from simple animations. V3 demonstrates strong disentanglement performance compared to existing unsupervised methods, along with superior out-of-distribution generalization under few-shot adaptation compared to supervised counterparts. Lastly, symbolic-level interpretability emerges in the learned content codebook, forging a near one-to-one alignment between machine representation and human knowledge.

CLSep 28, 2024
HealthQ: Unveiling Questioning Capabilities of LLM Chains in Healthcare Conversations

Ziyu Wang, Hao Li, Di Huang et al.

Effective patient care in digital healthcare requires large language models (LLMs) that not only answer questions but also actively gather critical information through well-crafted inquiries. This paper introduces HealthQ, a novel framework for evaluating the questioning capabilities of LLM healthcare chains. By implementing advanced LLM chains, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Chain of Thought (CoT), and reflective chains, HealthQ assesses how effectively these chains elicit comprehensive and relevant patient information. To achieve this, we integrate an LLM judge to evaluate generated questions across metrics such as specificity, relevance, and usefulness, while aligning these evaluations with traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) metrics like ROUGE and Named Entity Recognition (NER)-based set comparisons. We validate HealthQ using two custom datasets constructed from public medical datasets, ChatDoctor and MTS-Dialog, and demonstrate its robustness across multiple LLM judge models, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Claude. Our contributions are threefold: we present the first systematic framework for assessing questioning capabilities in healthcare conversations, establish a model-agnostic evaluation methodology, and provide empirical evidence linking high-quality questions to improved patient information elicitation.

MLMay 22, 2022
Fast Instrument Learning with Faster Rates

Ziyu Wang, Yuhao Zhou, Jun Zhu

We investigate nonlinear instrumental variable (IV) regression given high-dimensional instruments. We propose a simple algorithm which combines kernelized IV methods and an arbitrary, adaptive regression algorithm, accessed as a black box. Our algorithm enjoys faster-rate convergence and adapts to the dimensionality of informative latent features, while avoiding an expensive minimax optimization procedure, which has been necessary to establish similar guarantees. It further brings the benefit of flexible machine learning models to quasi-Bayesian uncertainty quantification, likelihood-based model selection, and model averaging. Simulation studies demonstrate the competitive performance of our method.

ROJan 26
A Pragmatic VLA Foundation Model

Wei Wu, Fan Lu, Yunnan Wang et al.

Offering great potential in robotic manipulation, a capable Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation model is expected to faithfully generalize across tasks and platforms while ensuring cost efficiency (e.g., data and GPU hours required for adaptation). To this end, we develop LingBot-VLA with around 20,000 hours of real-world data from 9 popular dual-arm robot configurations. Through a systematic assessment on 3 robotic platforms, each completing 100 tasks with 130 post-training episodes per task, our model achieves clear superiority over competitors, showcasing its strong performance and broad generalizability. We have also built an efficient codebase, which delivers a throughput of 261 samples per second per GPU with an 8-GPU training setup, representing a 1.5~2.8$\times$ (depending on the relied VLM base model) speedup over existing VLA-oriented codebases. The above features ensure that our model is well-suited for real-world deployment. To advance the field of robot learning, we provide open access to the code, base model, and benchmark data, with a focus on enabling more challenging tasks and promoting sound evaluation standards.

CLMar 29
PRBench: End-to-end Paper Reproduction in Physics Research

Shi Qiu, Junyi Deng, Yiwei Deng et al.

AI agents powered by large language models exhibit strong reasoning and problem-solving capabilities, enabling them to assist scientific research tasks such as formula derivation and code generation. However, whether these agents can reliably perform end-to-end reproduction from real scientific papers remains an open question. We introduce PRBench, a benchmark of 30 expert-curated tasks spanning 11 subfields of physics. Each task requires an agent to comprehend the methodology of a published paper, implement the corresponding algorithms from scratch, and produce quantitative results matching the original publication. Agents are provided only with the task instruction and paper content, and operate in a sandboxed execution environment. All tasks are contributed by domain experts from over 20 research groups at the School of Physics, Peking University, each grounded in a real published paper and validated through end-to-end reproduction with verified ground-truth results and detailed scoring rubrics. Using an agentified assessment pipeline, we evaluate a set of coding agents on PRBench and analyze their capabilities across key dimensions of scientific reasoning and execution. The best-performing agent, OpenAI Codex powered by GPT-5.3-Codex, achieves a mean overall score of 34%. All agents exhibit a zero end-to-end callback success rate, with particularly poor performance in data accuracy and code correctness. We further identify systematic failure modes, including errors in formula implementation, inability to debug numerical simulations, and fabrication of output data. Overall, PRBench provides a rigorous benchmark for evaluating progress toward autonomous scientific research.

LGFeb 8, 2024Code
DiffTORI: Differentiable Trajectory Optimization for Deep Reinforcement and Imitation Learning

Weikang Wan, Ziyu Wang, Yufei Wang et al. · cmu

This paper introduces DiffTORI, which utilizes Differentiable Trajectory Optimization as the policy representation to generate actions for deep Reinforcement and Imitation learning. Trajectory optimization is a powerful and widely used algorithm in control, parameterized by a cost and a dynamics function. The key to our approach is to leverage the recent progress in differentiable trajectory optimization, which enables computing the gradients of the loss with respect to the parameters of trajectory optimization. As a result, the cost and dynamics functions of trajectory optimization can be learned end-to-end. DiffTORI addresses the ``objective mismatch'' issue of prior model-based RL algorithms, as the dynamics model in DiffTORI is learned to directly maximize task performance by differentiating the policy gradient loss through the trajectory optimization process. We further benchmark DiffTORI for imitation learning on standard robotic manipulation task suites with high-dimensional sensory observations and compare our method to feed-forward policy classes as well as Energy-Based Models (EBM) and Diffusion. Across 15 model-based RL tasks and 35 imitation learning tasks with high-dimensional image and point cloud inputs, DiffTORI outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods in both domains. Our code is available at https://github.com/wkwan7/DiffTORI.

ROJan 16
The Great March 100: 100 Detail-oriented Tasks for Evaluating Embodied AI Agents

Ziyu Wang, Chenyuan Liu, Yushun Xiang et al.

Recently, with the rapid development of robot learning and imitation learning, numerous datasets and methods have emerged. However, these datasets and their task designs often lack systematic consideration and principles. This raises important questions: Do the current datasets and task designs truly advance the capabilities of robotic agents? Do evaluations on a few common tasks accurately reflect the differentiated performance of various methods proposed by different teams and evaluated on different tasks? To address these issues, we introduce the Great March 100 (\textbf{GM-100}) as the first step towards a robot learning Olympics. GM-100 consists of 100 carefully designed tasks that cover a wide range of interactions and long-tail behaviors, aiming to provide a diverse and challenging set of tasks to comprehensively evaluate the capabilities of robotic agents and promote diversity and complexity in robot dataset task designs. These tasks are developed through systematic analysis and expansion of existing task designs, combined with insights from human-object interaction primitives and object affordances. We collect a large amount of trajectory data on different robotic platforms and evaluate several baseline models. Experimental results demonstrate that the GM-100 tasks are 1) feasible to execute and 2) sufficiently challenging to effectively differentiate the performance of current VLA models. Our data and code are available at https://rhos.ai/research/gm-100.

SEJan 19Code
KOCO-BENCH: Can Large Language Models Leverage Domain Knowledge in Software Development?

Xue Jiang, Jiaru Qian, Xianjie Shi et al.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at general programming but struggle with domain-specific software development, necessitating domain specialization methods for LLMs to learn and utilize domain knowledge and data. However, existing domain-specific code benchmarks cannot evaluate the effectiveness of domain specialization methods, which focus on assessing what knowledge LLMs possess rather than how they acquire and apply new knowledge, lacking explicit knowledge corpora for developing domain specialization methods. To this end, we present KOCO-BENCH, a novel benchmark designed for evaluating domain specialization methods in real-world software development. KOCO-BENCH contains 6 emerging domains with 11 software frameworks and 25 projects, featuring curated knowledge corpora alongside multi-granularity evaluation tasks including domain code generation (from function-level to project-level with rigorous test suites) and domain knowledge understanding (via multiple-choice Q&A). Unlike previous benchmarks that only provide test sets for direct evaluation, KOCO-BENCH requires acquiring and applying diverse domain knowledge (APIs, rules, constraints, etc.) from knowledge corpora to solve evaluation tasks. Our evaluations reveal that KOCO-BENCH poses significant challenges to state-of-the-art LLMs. Even with domain specialization methods (e.g., SFT, RAG, kNN-LM) applied, improvements remain marginal. Best-performing coding agent, Claude Code, achieves only 34.2%, highlighting the urgent need for more effective domain specialization methods. We release KOCO-BENCH, evaluation code, and baselines to advance further research at https://github.com/jiangxxxue/KOCO-bench.

CLMar 29
KAT-Coder-V2 Technical Report

Fengxiang Li, Han Zhang, Haoyang Huang et al.

We present KAT-Coder-V2, an agentic coding model developed by the KwaiKAT team at Kuaishou. KAT-Coder-V2 adopts a "Specialize-then-Unify" paradigm that decomposes agentic coding into five expert domains - SWE, WebCoding, Terminal, WebSearch, and General - each undergoing independent supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, before being consolidated into a single model via on-policy distillation. We develop KwaiEnv, a modular infrastructure sustaining tens of thousands of concurrent sandbox instances, and scale RL training along task complexity, intent alignment, and scaffold generalization. We further propose MCLA for stabilizing MoE RL training and Tree Training for eliminating redundant computation over tree-structured trajectories with up to 6.2x speedup. KAT-Coder-V2 achieves 79.6% on SWE-bench Verified (vs. Claude Opus 4.6 at 80.8%), 88.7 on PinchBench (surpassing GLM-5 and MiniMax M2.7), ranks first across all three frontend aesthetics scenarios, and maintains strong generalist scores on Terminal-Bench Hard (46.8) and tau^2-Bench (93.9). Our model is publicly available at https://streamlake.com/product/kat-coder.

CLApr 17, 2025Code
CDF-RAG: Causal Dynamic Feedback for Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Elahe Khatibi, Ziyu Wang, Amir M. Rahmani

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has significantly enhanced large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive tasks by incorporating external knowledge retrieval. However, existing RAG frameworks primarily rely on semantic similarity and correlation-driven retrieval, limiting their ability to distinguish true causal relationships from spurious associations. This results in responses that may be factually grounded but fail to establish cause-and-effect mechanisms, leading to incomplete or misleading insights. To address this issue, we introduce Causal Dynamic Feedback for Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation (CDF-RAG), a framework designed to improve causal consistency, factual accuracy, and explainability in generative reasoning. CDF-RAG iteratively refines queries, retrieves structured causal graphs, and enables multi-hop causal reasoning across interconnected knowledge sources. Additionally, it validates responses against causal pathways, ensuring logically coherent and factually grounded outputs. We evaluate CDF-RAG on four diverse datasets, demonstrating its ability to improve response accuracy and causal correctness over existing RAG-based methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ elakhatibi/CDF-RAG.

ROApr 1Code
VRUD: A Drone Dataset for Complex Vehicle-VRU Interactions within Mixed Traffic

Ziyu Wang, Hongrui Kou, Cheng Wang et al.

The Operational Design Domain (ODD) of urbanoriented Level 4 (L4) autonomous driving, especially for autonomous robotaxis, confronts formidable challenges in complex urban mixed traffic environments. These challenges stem mainly from the high density of Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) and their highly uncertain and unpredictable interaction behaviors. However, existing open-source datasets predominantly focus on structured scenarios such as highways or regulated intersections, leaving a critical gap in data representing chaotic, unstructured urban environments. To address this, this paper proposes an efficient, high-precision method for constructing drone-based datasets and establishes the Vehicle-Vulnerable Road User Interaction Dataset (VRUD), as illustrated in Figure 1. Distinct from prior works, VRUD is collected from typical "Urban Villages" in Shenzhen, characterized by loose traffic supervision and extreme occlusion. The dataset comprises 4 hours of 4K/30Hz recording, containing 11,479 VRU trajectories and 1,939 vehicle trajectories. A key characteristic of VRUD is its composition: VRUs account for about 87% of all traffic participants, significantly exceeding the proportions in existing benchmarks. Furthermore, unlike datasets that only provide raw trajectories, we extracted 4,002 multi-agent interaction scenarios based on a novel Vector Time to Collision (VTTC) threshold, supported by standard OpenDRIVE HD maps. This study provides valuable, rare edge-case resources for enhancing the safety performance of ADS in complex, unstructured urban environments. To facilitate further research, we have made the VRUD dataset open-source at: https://zzi4.github.io/VRUD/.

LGMay 19, 2025Code
PPTNet: A Hybrid Periodic Pattern-Transformer Architecture for Traffic Flow Prediction and Congestion Identification

Hongrui Kou, Jingkai Li, Ziyu Wang et al.

Accurate prediction of traffic flow parameters and real time identification of congestion states are essential for the efficient operation of intelligent transportation systems. This paper proposes a Periodic Pattern Transformer Network (PPTNet) for traffic flow prediction, integrating periodic pattern extraction with the Transformer architecture, coupled with a fuzzy inference method for real-time congestion identification. Firstly, a high-precision traffic flow dataset (Traffic Flow Dataset for China's Congested Highways and Expressways, TF4CHE) suitable for congested highway scenarios in China is constructed based on drone aerial imagery data. Subsequently, the proposed PPTNet employs Fast Fourier Transform to capture multi-scale periodic patterns and utilizes two-dimensional Inception convolutions to efficiently extract intra and inter periodic features. A Transformer decoder dynamically models temporal dependencies, enabling accurate predictions of traffic density and speed. Finally, congestion probabilities are calculated in real-time using the predicted outcomes via a Mamdani fuzzy inference-based congestion identification module. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed PPTNet significantly outperforms mainstream traffic prediction methods in prediction accuracy, and the congestion identification module effectively identifies real-time road congestion states, verifying the superiority and practicality of the proposed method in real-world traffic scenarios. Project page: https://github.com/ADSafetyJointLab/PPTNet.

LGSep 30, 2022
Application of Deep Q Learning with Simulation Results for Elevator Optimization

Zheng Cao, Raymond Guo, Caesar M. Tuguinay et al.

This paper presents a methodology for combining programming and mathematics to optimize elevator wait times. Based on simulated user data generated according to the canonical three-peak model of elevator traffic, we first develop a naive model from an intuitive understanding of the logic behind elevators. We take into consideration a general array of features including capacity, acceleration, and maximum wait time thresholds to adequately model realistic circumstances. Using the same evaluation framework, we proceed to develop a Deep Q Learning model in an attempt to match the hard-coded naive approach for elevator control. Throughout the majority of the paper, we work under a Markov Decision Process (MDP) schema, but later explore how the assumption fails to characterize the highly stochastic overall Elevator Group Control System (EGCS).

CLFeb 10Code
FM SO.P: A Progressive Task Mixture Framework with Automatic Evaluation for Cross-Domain SOP Understanding

Siyuan Huang, Ziyu Wang, Chao Pan et al.

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are critical for enterprise operations, yet existing language models struggle with SOP understanding and cross-domain generalization. Current methods fail because joint training cannot differentiate between reasoning capabilities that SOP requires: terminology precision, sequential ordering, and constraint reasoning. We propose FM SO.P, solving these challenges through two novelties. First, we introduce progressive task mixtures that build capabilities by stages across three task types with cumulative data: concept disambiguation for terminology precision, action sequence understanding for procedural correctness, and scenario-aware graph reasoning for conditional logic. Second, we propose an automatic multi-agent evaluation system consisting of three agents that adaptively generate rubrics, stratified test sets, and rubric scoring, adapting to domains (e.g., temporal constraints for DMV, regulatory compliance for banking). Evaluated on SOPBench across seven domains (Bank, DMV, Healthcare, Market, University, Library, Hotel), FM SO.P achieves 48.3\% pass rate with our 32B model and 34.3\% with our opensource 7B model, matching Qwen-2.5-72B-Instruct baseline (34.4\%) with 10x fewer parameters.

LGMay 8
PerCaM-Health: Personalized Dynamic Causal Graphs for Healthcare Reasoning

Elahe Khatibi, Ziyu Wang, Saba A. Farahani et al.

Personalized healthcare decisions require reasoning about how physiological and behavioral variables influence an individual patient over time. Existing temporal causal discovery methods are poorly matched to this setting: cohort-level models provide stable but non-personalized structures, while per-patient discovery is unreliable because individual trajectories are short, noisy, irregular, and non-stationary. This creates a fundamental gap between population-level causal modeling and the patient-specific, time-varying mechanisms needed for intervention reasoning. We introduce PerCaM-Health, a framework for learning personalized dynamic causal graphs from longitudinal health data. The framework learns a knowledge-guided population temporal graph, then conservatively adapts and evolves it using patient-specific temporal evidence and rolling-window updates, producing interpretable and auditable graph sequences. By coupling these graphs with temporal structural equations, the framework enables patient-level counterfactual queries, such as estimating short-horizon outcome changes under hypothetical behavioral interventions. Experiments on a semi-synthetic dynamic health benchmark show that PerCaM-Health improves graph recovery, dynamic edge tracking, and intervention direction accuracy compared to cohort-level, per-patient, and non-personalized temporal baselines. These results demonstrate that jointly modeling personalization and temporal evolution yields more reliable causal structure and intervention reasoning.

LGJan 14
Deep Incomplete Multi-View Clustering via Hierarchical Imputation and Alignment

Yiming Du, Ziyu Wang, Jian Li et al.

Incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC) aims to discover shared cluster structures from multi-view data with partial observations. The core challenges lie in accurately imputing missing views without introducing bias, while maintaining semantic consistency across views and compactness within clusters. To address these challenges, we propose DIMVC-HIA, a novel deep IMVC framework that integrates hierarchical imputation and alignment with four key components: (1) view-specific autoencoders for latent feature extraction, coupled with a view-shared clustering predictor to produce soft cluster assignments; (2) a hierarchical imputation module that first estimates missing cluster assignments based on cross-view contrastive similarity, and then reconstructs missing features using intra-view, intra-cluster statistics; (3) an energy-based semantic alignment module, which promotes intra-cluster compactness by minimizing energy variance around low-energy cluster anchors; and (4) a contrastive assignment alignment module, which enhances cross-view consistency and encourages confident, well-separated cluster predictions. Experiments on benchmarks demonstrate that our framework achieves superior performance under varying levels of missingness.

LGMay 28, 2023Code
Distill Gold from Massive Ores: Bi-level Data Pruning towards Efficient Dataset Distillation

Yue Xu, Yong-Lu Li, Kaitong Cui et al.

Data-efficient learning has garnered significant attention, especially given the current trend of large multi-modal models. Recently, dataset distillation has become an effective approach by synthesizing data samples that are essential for network training. However, it remains to be explored which samples are essential for the dataset distillation process itself. In this work, we study the data efficiency and selection for the dataset distillation task. By re-formulating the dynamics of distillation, we provide insight into the inherent redundancy in the real dataset, both theoretically and empirically. We propose to use the empirical loss value as a static data pruning criterion. To further compensate for the variation of the data value in training, we find the most contributing samples based on their causal effects on the distillation. The proposed selection strategy can efficiently exploit the training dataset, outperform the previous SOTA distillation algorithms, and consistently enhance the distillation algorithms, even on much larger-scale and more heterogeneous datasets, e.g., full ImageNet-1K and Kinetics-400. We believe this paradigm will open up new avenues in the dynamics of distillation and pave the way for efficient dataset distillation. Our code is available on https://github.com/silicx/GoldFromOres-BiLP.

CVJan 28, 2022Code
DynaMixer: A Vision MLP Architecture with Dynamic Mixing

Ziyu Wang, Wenhao Jiang, Yiming Zhu et al.

Recently, MLP-like vision models have achieved promising performances on mainstream visual recognition tasks. In contrast with vision transformers and CNNs, the success of MLP-like models shows that simple information fusion operations among tokens and channels can yield a good representation power for deep recognition models. However, existing MLP-like models fuse tokens through static fusion operations, lacking adaptability to the contents of the tokens to be mixed. Thus, customary information fusion procedures are not effective enough. To this end, this paper presents an efficient MLP-like network architecture, dubbed DynaMixer, resorting to dynamic information fusion. Critically, we propose a procedure, on which the DynaMixer model relies, to dynamically generate mixing matrices by leveraging the contents of all the tokens to be mixed. To reduce the time complexity and improve the robustness, a dimensionality reduction technique and a multi-segment fusion mechanism are adopted. Our proposed DynaMixer model (97M parameters) achieves 84.3\% top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet-1K dataset without extra training data, performing favorably against the state-of-the-art vision MLP models. When the number of parameters is reduced to 26M, it still achieves 82.7\% top-1 accuracy, surpassing the existing MLP-like models with a similar capacity. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/ziyuwwang/DynaMixer}.

LGMar 30, 2021Code
Benchmarks for Deep Off-Policy Evaluation

Justin Fu, Mohammad Norouzi, Ofir Nachum et al.

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) holds the promise of being able to leverage large, offline datasets for both evaluating and selecting complex policies for decision making. The ability to learn offline is particularly important in many real-world domains, such as in healthcare, recommender systems, or robotics, where online data collection is an expensive and potentially dangerous process. Being able to accurately evaluate and select high-performing policies without requiring online interaction could yield significant benefits in safety, time, and cost for these applications. While many OPE methods have been proposed in recent years, comparing results between papers is difficult because currently there is a lack of a comprehensive and unified benchmark, and measuring algorithmic progress has been challenging due to the lack of difficult evaluation tasks. In order to address this gap, we present a collection of policies that in conjunction with existing offline datasets can be used for benchmarking off-policy evaluation. Our tasks include a range of challenging high-dimensional continuous control problems, with wide selections of datasets and policies for performing policy selection. The goal of our benchmark is to provide a standardized measure of progress that is motivated from a set of principles designed to challenge and test the limits of existing OPE methods. We perform an evaluation of state-of-the-art algorithms and provide open-source access to our data and code to foster future research in this area.

LGDec 14, 2020Code
Fork or Fail: Cycle-Consistent Training with Many-to-One Mappings

Qipeng Guo, Zhijing Jin, Ziyu Wang et al.

Cycle-consistent training is widely used for jointly learning a forward and inverse mapping between two domains of interest without the cumbersome requirement of collecting matched pairs within each domain. In this regard, the implicit assumption is that there exists (at least approximately) a ground-truth bijection such that a given input from either domain can be accurately reconstructed from successive application of the respective mappings. But in many applications no such bijection can be expected to exist and large reconstruction errors can compromise the success of cycle-consistent training. As one important instance of this limitation, we consider practically-relevant situations where there exists a many-to-one or surjective mapping between domains. To address this regime, we develop a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) approach that can be viewed as converting surjective mappings to implicit bijections whereby reconstruction errors in both directions can be minimized, and as a natural byproduct, realistic output diversity can be obtained in the one-to-many direction. As theoretical motivation, we analyze a simplified scenario whereby minima of the proposed CVAE-based energy function align with the recovery of ground-truth surjective mappings. On the empirical side, we consider a synthetic image dataset with known ground-truth, as well as a real-world application involving natural language generation from knowledge graphs and vice versa, a prototypical surjective case. For the latter, our CVAE pipeline can capture such many-to-one mappings during cycle training while promoting textural diversity for graph-to-text tasks. Our code is available at github.com/QipengGuo/CycleGT *A condensed version of this paper has been accepted to AISTATS 2021. This version contains additional content and updates.

LGJun 24, 2020Code
RL Unplugged: A Suite of Benchmarks for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Caglar Gulcehre, Ziyu Wang, Alexander Novikov et al.

Offline methods for reinforcement learning have a potential to help bridge the gap between reinforcement learning research and real-world applications. They make it possible to learn policies from offline datasets, thus overcoming concerns associated with online data collection in the real-world, including cost, safety, or ethical concerns. In this paper, we propose a benchmark called RL Unplugged to evaluate and compare offline RL methods. RL Unplugged includes data from a diverse range of domains including games (e.g., Atari benchmark) and simulated motor control problems (e.g., DM Control Suite). The datasets include domains that are partially or fully observable, use continuous or discrete actions, and have stochastic vs. deterministic dynamics. We propose detailed evaluation protocols for each domain in RL Unplugged and provide an extensive analysis of supervised learning and offline RL methods using these protocols. We will release data for all our tasks and open-source all algorithms presented in this paper. We hope that our suite of benchmarks will increase the reproducibility of experiments and make it possible to study challenging tasks with a limited computational budget, thus making RL research both more systematic and more accessible across the community. Moving forward, we view RL Unplugged as a living benchmark suite that will evolve and grow with datasets contributed by the research community and ourselves. Our project page is available on https://git.io/JJUhd.

CEMar 14
A fluid--peridynamic structure model of deformation and damage of microchannels

Ziyu Wang, Ivan C. Christov

Soft-walled microchannels arise in many applications, ranging from organ-on-a-chip platforms to soft-robotic actuators. However, despite extensive research on their static and dynamic response, the potential failure of these devices has not been addressed. To this end, we explore fluid--structure interaction in microchannels whose compliant top wall is governed by a nonlocal mechanical theory capable of simulating both deformation and material failure. We develop a one-dimensional model by coupling viscous flow under the lubrication approximation to a state-based peridynamic formulation of an Euler--Bernoulli beam. The peridynamic formulation enables the wall to be modeled as a genuinely nonlocal beam, and the integral form of its equation of motion remains valid whether the deformation field is smooth or contains discontinuities. Through the proposed computational model, we explore the steady and time-dependent behaviors of this fluid--peridynamic structure interaction. We rationalize the wave and damping dynamics observed in the simulations through a dispersion (linearized) analysis of the coupled system, finding that, with increasing nonlocal influence, wave propagation exhibits a clear departure from classical behavior, characterized by a gradual suppression of the phase velocity. The main contribution of our study is to outline the potential failure scenarios of the microchannel's soft wall under the hydrodynamic load of the flow. Specifically, we find a dividing curve in the space spanned by the dimensionless Strouhal number (quantifying unsteady inertia of the beam) and the compliance number (quantifying the strength of the fluid--structure coupling) separating scenarios of potential failure during transient conditions from potential failure at the steady load.

LGFeb 16, 2024
Differential Private Federated Transfer Learning for Mental Health Monitoring in Everyday Settings: A Case Study on Stress Detection

Ziyu Wang, Zhongqi Yang, Iman Azimi et al.

Mental health conditions, prevalent across various demographics, necessitate efficient monitoring to mitigate their adverse impacts on life quality. The surge in data-driven methodologies for mental health monitoring has underscored the importance of privacy-preserving techniques in handling sensitive health data. Despite strides in federated learning for mental health monitoring, existing approaches struggle with vulnerabilities to certain cyber-attacks and data insufficiency in real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce a differential private federated transfer learning framework for mental health monitoring to enhance data privacy and enrich data sufficiency. To accomplish this, we integrate federated learning with two pivotal elements: (1) differential privacy, achieved by introducing noise into the updates, and (2) transfer learning, employing a pre-trained universal model to adeptly address issues of data imbalance and insufficiency. We evaluate the framework by a case study on stress detection, employing a dataset of physiological and contextual data from a longitudinal study. Our finding show that the proposed approach can attain a 10% boost in accuracy and a 21% enhancement in recall, while ensuring privacy protection.

SDMay 16, 2024
Whole-Song Hierarchical Generation of Symbolic Music Using Cascaded Diffusion Models

Ziyu Wang, Lejun Min, Gus Xia

Recent deep music generation studies have put much emphasis on long-term generation with structures. However, we are yet to see high-quality, well-structured whole-song generation. In this paper, we make the first attempt to model a full music piece under the realization of compositional hierarchy. With a focus on symbolic representations of pop songs, we define a hierarchical language, in which each level of hierarchy focuses on the semantics and context dependency at a certain music scope. The high-level languages reveal whole-song form, phrase, and cadence, whereas the low-level languages focus on notes, chords, and their local patterns. A cascaded diffusion model is trained to model the hierarchical language, where each level is conditioned on its upper levels. Experiments and analysis show that our model is capable of generating full-piece music with recognizable global verse-chorus structure and cadences, and the music quality is higher than the baselines. Additionally, we show that the proposed model is controllable in a flexible way. By sampling from the interpretable hierarchical languages or adjusting pre-trained external representations, users can control the music flow via various features such as phrase harmonic structures, rhythmic patterns, and accompaniment texture.

NIApr 26
Multi-Plane HyperX: A Low-Latency and Cost-Effective Network for Large-Scale AI and HPC Systems

Ziyu Wang, Fei Lei, Dezun Dong

Multi-plane architectures have become increasingly prevalent in the Fat-Tree networks of AI data centers. By leveraging multiple ports on a single network interface card (NIC) or multiple NICs within a scale-up domain, each port or NIC is allocated to an independent network plane, thereby provisioning the overall system with multiple network planes. However, no prior literature has explored the application of multi-plane technologies to direct networks such as HyperX. This paper investigates the multi-plane HyperX network and demonstrates that, compared to state-of-the-art network topologies like multi-plane Fat-Tree, Dragonfly, and Dragonfly+, the multi-plane HyperX architecture achieves a significantly smaller network diameter and superior cost-effectiveness.

LGDec 28, 2023
Generalizable Visual Reinforcement Learning with Segment Anything Model

Ziyu Wang, Yanjie Ze, Yifei Sun et al.

Learning policies that can generalize to unseen environments is a fundamental challenge in visual reinforcement learning (RL). While most current methods focus on acquiring robust visual representations through auxiliary supervision, pre-training, or data augmentation, the potential of modern vision foundation models remains underleveraged. In this work, we introduce Segment Anything Model for Generalizable visual RL (SAM-G), a novel framework that leverages the promptable segmentation ability of Segment Anything Model (SAM) to enhance the generalization capabilities of visual RL agents. We utilize image features from DINOv2 and SAM to find correspondence as point prompts to SAM, and then SAM produces high-quality masked images for agents directly. Evaluated across 8 DMControl tasks and 3 Adroit tasks, SAM-G significantly improves the visual generalization ability without altering the RL agents' architecture but merely their observations. Notably, SAM-G achieves 44% and 29% relative improvements on the challenging video hard setting on DMControl and Adroit respectively, compared to state-of-the-art methods. Video and code: https://yanjieze.com/SAM-G/

CLFeb 29, 2024
PROC2PDDL: Open-Domain Planning Representations from Texts

Tianyi Zhang, Li Zhang, Zhaoyi Hou et al.

Planning in a text-based environment continues to be a major challenge for AI systems. Recent approaches have used language models to predict a planning domain definition (e.g., PDDL) but have only been evaluated in closed-domain simulated environments. To address this, we present Proc2PDDL , the first dataset containing open-domain procedural texts paired with expert-annotated PDDL representations. Using this dataset, we evaluate state-of-the-art models on defining the preconditions and effects of actions. We show that Proc2PDDL is highly challenging, with GPT-3.5's success rate close to 0% and GPT-4's around 35%. Our analysis shows both syntactic and semantic errors, indicating LMs' deficiency in both generating domain-specific prgorams and reasoning about events. We hope this analysis and dataset helps future progress towards integrating the best of LMs and formal planning.